Harvey Brooks

Its four in the afternoon, the sun is blazing, and Brooks is overcome with memories. “I really miss Jimi Hendrix. Women loved him, and not only women. He knew how to drive his audience crazy. I met him at his first festival, we were in the same hotel for a few days, some of the most beautiful women in the world were there and they all wanted him.

Before our last shows I was making mixes in the studio and Hendrix was in the next room. We talked about doing something together with Miles Davis, and Jimi was complaining about his managers. ‘Harvey, they are just killing me, they want me to do a bunch of shows, and I just don’t want to. I want to sit quietly and write music, and not work so hard, but my manager says I have to go do tours for the money,’ he said to me. So I told him ‘Jimi, you don’t owe them anything, you just look out for yourself.’ But he said ‘Harvey, too many people are dependent on me and my music,’ and he went out on tour. He was a human being but they treated him like a machine. I certainly blame his managers for his death.

“Jim Morrison, like Jimi, died because of the music industry. Success killed them, they lost their grip on reality, they were overcome. Freedom is a good thing, but it has to be under control. Jimi, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison all needed a good doctor or a serious psychiatrist, not drugs and alcohol, to solve their problems. But they had nobody to help them. Nobody really cared about them. They lived in a time when the monstrosity of the music industry was killing its best and brightest. Morrison would go completely crazy sometimes from drugs and there was nothing to do but to wait for it to pass. When he wasn’t on drugs he was a very nice guy, even charming, but the drugs were stronger than him. When he was under the influence of drugs he was scary sometimes.